Hannah Gadsby

I have skills, people, I know what I am doing, even if you don’t like it.

I needed my audience to feel safe so that I could take that safety away and not give it back. Why? Because that is the shape of trauma.

The purpose of Nanette was never to catapult me into the top rung of the comedy conversation, quite the opposite, I was trying to cull my audience, I was trying to find my small pocket of genuine fans so I could be who I wanted to be on stage, without worrying about making a broad audience feel comfortable. But from the very first time I performed Nanette my audience refused to let me push them away, they made it clear that they understood my pain and that they cared. And so, what I had thought would effectively seal me off into an obscure corner of both my life and my art form instead became something far bigger than me, something of an international cultural phenomenon that not only shook the comedy world out of its tree but pushed my own existence into a shape I no longer recognise.